Automotive and communication industries provide broadband Internet connectivity to mobile devices (nodes) in vehicles. Applications include road safety, driver assistance, information, entertainment, and vehicle telematics. Telematics is any integrated use of telecommunications and informatics, also known as ICT (Information and Communications Technology).
These applications use a range of wireless communication methods based on Wi-Fi, dedicated short range radios (DSRC), or 3G/4G radios, such as Mobile WiMAX, and long term evolution (LTE). Infrastructure-based vehicular networks refer to vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) networks and vehicle-to-roadside (V2R) networks.
The networks use statically deployed access points (APs) or base stations (BSs) to communicate with the nodes. Despite a higher cost to deploy and maintain the AP/BS infrastructure, mobile applications are interested in infrastructure-based networks because of a higher reliability and constant availability where such infrastructure exists.
Scheduling methods for data delivery in mobile wireless networks are known. One method uses link-layer scheduling for non-real-time, non-safety data transmission in V2I systems proposed for the IEEE 802.11e standard. That method attempts to deliver as much information as possible considering a limited radio coverage of road segment, and relatively high vehicle speeds.
Another method describes scheduling for the downlink of a cellular network, including joint Knopp and Humblet (K&H) round robin (RR) scheduler and resource constrained (RC) scheduling, to achieve capacity gain and minimize channel usage under quality of service (QoS) constraints.
Another method describes physical-layer scheduling and resource allocation mechanism for the downlink in a code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, maximizing a weighted sum throughput.
Another method describes a scheduling mechanism for a downlink of a cellular orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system, with considerations including integer carrier allocations, different sub-channelization methods, and self-noises due to imperfect channel estimates or phase noise.
Most of the prior art scheduling methods do not considered the characteristics of applications in vehicular networks, and also depend on a specific low-layer technologies of radio access network (RAN). Only a few prior art methods describe scheduling for the applications in vehicular networks.
One method describes application-layer service scheduling of vehicle-roadside data access, considering service deadline, data size, and broadcasting.